deep-ass-research

Most "research" an agent does is one search, three skimmed snippets, and a confident paragraph that may or may not be true. DAR runs the loop a careful human would: cast wide, decide where to go deep, read the primary source (not the thread about it), send skeptics to disprove every load-bearing claim, and write it all into an Obsidian vault where every sentence traces to a source you can re-open.

It's host-agnostic: the methodology is plain markdown (core/), and thin adapters bind it to Claude Code, Cursor, opencode, or anything that reads AGENTS.md.

🪞 Before / After

You ask: "How much revenue does Perplexity make and what's their strategy?"

Same question. One is a vibe. The other is a defensible, navigable answer you can audit.

🧭 How it works

DAR has two halves that share one spine — the charter (what we're actually trying to answer). A gate stops it from going deep too early; a drift guard stops it from wandering once it's deep. The charter is a compass, not a cage: useful tangents get promoted, dead ones pruned.

flowchart TD
    A(["📥 Research request"]) --> P["0 · Preflight<br/>bind capability verbs to host tools"]
    P --> C["1 · Decompose &amp; Charter<br/>success criteria SC1…SCn · scope · clarify with user"]
    C --> B["2 · Breadth<br/>parallel SEARCH-only scouts map the landscape"]
    B --> G{"Gate<br/>saturated? · rankable?<br/>anchors hit?"}
    G -->|widen one wave| B
    G -->|too broad: narrow| C
    G ==>|human check-in| D["3 · Depth loop<br/>divers FETCH full primaries<br/>→ atomic, cited claim notes"]
    D --> DG{"4.5 · Drift Guard<br/>still serving the charter?"}
    DG -->|CONTINUE| D
    DG -->|REFOCUS: prune / promote| D
    DG -->|ESCALATE: ask the user| C
    DG ==>|CONCLUDE| V["4 · Verify<br/>3 skeptics try to refute · 2-of-3 majority<br/>→ arbiter breaks ties"]
    V --> S["5 · Synthesize<br/>librarian links &amp; dedupes → synthesizer writes the map"]
    S --> O(["📦 Deliver<br/>Map-of-Content · report · open questions"])

    classDef phase fill:#0f172a,stroke:#334155,color:#e2e8f0;
    classDef gate fill:#fde68a,stroke:#b45309,color:#1c1917;
    classDef done fill:#bbf7d0,stroke:#15803d,color:#052e16;
    class P,C,B,D,V,S phase;
    class G,DG gate;
    class A,O done;

The principles behind each step (why they exist) — straight out of how good researchers actually work:

• Range before depth. Cheap, disposable SEARCH-only scouts first; expensive FETCH only on threads that survive the gate.
• Read the primary, not the summary. Divers fetch the full source (incl. appendices & limitations) into raw/; a claim sourced only to a summary is quarantined.
• Don't fool yourself. Skeptics are scored to disprove claims; disconfirming evidence is written into the note; contradictions are downgraded, never deleted.
• Synthesis is the contribution. The deliverable is a navigable _MOC.md + [[wikilink]] graph + a report answering each criterion — not a wall of text.

📦 Install